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Virsec hits $137 million investment milestone after latest round
Thu, 22nd Jul 2021
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Virsec has received a $100 million Series C investment from a community of industry players and company builders. The completion of the round brings total funding in the company to $137 million.

Virsec's Series C investors range from the former chairman and CEO of Cisco, John Chambers, to the former chairman and CEO of EMC, Mike Ruettgers, to a number of former high-ranking government and intelligence officials.

Led by BlueIO, the round also includes Allen - Company LLC, Arena Holdings, Intuitive Venture Partners, JC2 Ventures, Artiman Ventures, Quantum Valley Investments, and Marker Hill Capital.

With focus and urgency from public and private sector leaders to advance cybersecurity collaboration for the purposes of national and economic defence, Virsec has assembled expertise and resources to expand its team, and power an acceleration of its solutions, according to a statement from the company.

Virsec Security Platform (VSP) is designed to stop sophisticated attacks at the first point of insurgence, so an adversary does not have the dwell time in software to orchestrate and execute their malicious plans.

With more than 50 patents, Virsec's application-aware workload protection platform incorporates System Integrity Assurance, Application Control and Memory Protection into a single solution.

Overall, Virsec states it aims to deliver in-depth visibility across the entire workload to detect and block known and unknown threats that remain concealed by heuristic and endpoint security solutions.

The Virsec solution maps the expected performance of each application on a workload and protects the memory those applications use to execute. The solution ensures the components of those applications are correct and unmodified before they are allowed to execute, and any deviation from the norm is treated as a threat.

Virsec chief executive officer Dave Furneaux says, “The world runs on software, and with the onslaught of damaging attacks to it, the world is also in a cyber crisis.

"That is why Virsec developed an unprecedented, radical, and multi-patented approach to fully protect software while it is executing, regardless of its environment.

"We are able to provide our customers a golden image of their software, bugs and all, and therefore we instantaneously detect and stop attacks before they happen.

"This is the type of game-changing technology that the market immediately needs. We are extraordinarily grateful for the community of investors, advisors, and security practitioners that have assembled around the company to help us achieve our mission.

Top investors also commented on the announcement.

Ruettgers says, “Clearly, cyber security products are not working well enough. Judging by the response from leading edge enterprises, Virsec is a game-changing business with a completely differentiated protection first approach to solving the cybersecurity crisis. Virsec stands alone amidst a sea of similar security companies."

Chambers says, “Traditional and legacy security solutions are simply not enough to protect organisations from the extremely advanced attacks we are seeing today. This is why I decided to invest in Virsec.

"We are at an inflection point in cybersecurity and Virsec does what is needed: fully protect application workloads at runtime before an attacker can even make a move."

Former CISO of MassMutual, AETNA and J.P. Morgan, Jim Routh, says, “The future of cybersecurity resilience for all enterprises includes fully protecting software. Virsec has the capability to fully protect software in the workload in an automated and enterprise-friendly way.

"Their runtime, high-performance protection technology is well thought-out from a deployment and operational perspective. Virsec is leading this emerging workload protection market with technology to alert and fully protect software in real time."